3DExperience Platform Enables Innovation & e-Bee EV

Without a doubt, finishing a project is one of the hardest parts of the creative process. Endless books, detailing different techniques, have been published in the vain attempt to help processes move to completion. But electronic file sharing and digital workspaces are helping people innovate.

Take the Capgemini Group subsidiary Sogeti High Tech. It has focused on helping other companies organize and process information since the the IT market was born. But new partnerships are forming to address the high-collaboration, on-the-go project management needs of today's mobile world. Last month, Sogeti agreed to use applications from Dassault Systemes' popular 3DExperience CAD design and system analysis package.

The e-Bee electric vehicle is designed to be customizable for each user. Profiles are stored locally, and changes are accessible in the vehicles many touchscreens. (Source: Visteon)

Sogeti offers consulting services for the aerospace, defense, energy, transportation, and mobility industries. In the next few months, it will convert the data of more than 150 products to work with the Catia, Enovia, and Simulia, applications in the 3DExperience platform. Sogeti CIO Laurent Rouchouse said in a press release that this new platform offers more capabilities, openness, and innovative collaboration functionalities that will help Sogeti employees and customers at 250 international workstations.

Coordinating tasks among developers, consultants, customers, and administrators is a daunting task, but Sogeti is so confident in Dassault's tools that it will be the first service company to make such a monumental shift.

Visteon Corp. also saw what the 3DExperience platform could do when the company was designing its electric vehicle, the e-Bee. From the beginning, the main goal was to revamp the creation process by incorporating input from strategic customers, key suppliers, and business partners simultaneously. Using Dassault Systemes' 3DSwYm social cloud application, e-Bee developers could share evolving design ideas and simulation results easily without added cost or special downloads or hardware.

The 3DExperience platform was used to design the e-Bee's exterior and interior design and its electronic systems and to model its climate control. Using 3DSwYm's "experience and demonstrate" capabilities, Visteon developers all over the world could communicate as if they were in a regular meeting, and they received feedback from customers, partners, and suppliers in seconds, not weeks. All this was done while lowering prototyping costs and improving efficiency and innovation.

The steps by which a project turns from ideas to realities are changing. Using the tools only the digital world can offer, people from many enterprises -- engineering and non-engineering -- are being included in projects that were mostly exclusive in decades past. Such collaborations hold much more potential than enticing the consumer, but we are just scratching the surface of development structures in the cloud.

I suppose that is what fills of the driver profile, climate control settings. I suppose EVs are not a practical in extreme hot/cold weather. In other words, I don't think they would be energy efficient in Chicago, where temps are all over the place. This is something to consider, as I toy with the idea of buying an EV.

Cooling and heating go way beyond just tending to cut into the range of an EV. The power needed for warm weather air cooling may exceed the power to drive down the road in many cases. Making the matter worse, some EVs in the past have not had openable windows. For heating, using the waste heat from the drive motor and electronics could be handy, but I am not aware of thet heat ever being used. Possibly some other means of heating will need to be created, perhaps modeled after the heaters used in the older Corvair vehicles. Probably current technology could do that job better, though.

So it is a real consideration as to how these vehicles would work out in areas subject to other than very moderate temperatures. Of course, consider thet until the 1960's, most vehicles did not even have air conditioning availablke as an option. So just because it is now difficult to purchase a passenger vehicle without A/C, perhaps a reversal of the trand could be started.

As for preheating or pre-cooling a vehicle while it is still plugged in, that is an expensive luxury option indeed, at least at all of those "credit card enabled" charging outlets, which are the only kind that I have seen in the Greater Detroit area. Not to mention how ticked off some of us might feel if the charging outlets were being hogged by those wanting to pre-cool their vehicles just prior to their eventual departure.

Thanks for this Cabe. I had the pleasure of consulting for Visteon back in the late 1990s on some very innovative engineering projects -- I'm delighted to hear they are still exploring. The 3DExperience platform's ability to receive "feedback from customers, partners, and suppliers in seconds, not weeks" is most definitely one of the magic ingredients. In undergraduate education as much as I dread grading homework and papers, rapid feedback is among the key items that make an educational course successful. Getting grades back weeks later or (gasp) not knowing how you are doing in the course until your grades arrive after the final exam is a whole bushel of lost opportunities for learning. Just imagine having a 24-hour delay buffer on your own biological senses... It would make survival, let alone evolution, nearly impossible.

Virtual Reality (VR) headsets are getting ready to explode onto the market and it appears all the heavy tech companies are trying to out-develop one another with better features than their competition. Fledgling start-up Vrvana has joined the fray.

A Tokyo company, Miraisens Inc., has unveiled a device that allows users to move virtual 3D objects around and "feel" them via a vibration sensor. The device has many applications within the gaming, medical, and 3D-printing industries.

While every company might have their own solution for PLM, Aras Innovator 10 intends to make PLM easier for all company sizes through its customization. The program is also not resource intensive, which allows it to be appropriated for any use. Some have even linked it to the Raspberry Pi.

solidThinking updated its Inspire program with a multitude of features to expedite the conception and prototype process. The latest version lets users blend design with engineering and manufacturing constraints to produce the cheapest, most efficient design before production.

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